Developers who are already familiar with other scripting languages, for example Ruby, will have few problems adapting to GNU Smalltalk.

A relatively important difference from other Smalltalk dialects is the availability of namespaces, a mechanism for restricting the referential scope of such names. While advanced usage of name spaces can be quite involved, in practice it is relatively simple and based on a few essential points.

The top-level name space is named Smalltalk.

All classes and add-ons are defined in sub-namespaces of Smalltalk.

Most Seaside classes are in the namespace named Seaside.

Your application should, in general, be in a namespace that you create for your own usage. If you use the package system of GNU Smalltalk, switching to a separate namespace is actually done automatically while loading the package.

However, for simplicity especially during early development, you can define your classes directly in the Smalltalk name space.